Let me tell you the story of the time a homophobe gave my friend the middle finger in a BBQ restaurant.
It happened a few weeks ago when I was visiting my friend Libby in Nashville. (For those wondering, I’ve asked Libby if I can share this story publicly, and she gave me permission.)
Libby lives with her girlfriend in a nice cozy home in East Nashville. Her girlfriend had a friend visiting at the time too, so there were four of us—a ragtag bunch of hooligans roaming wildly around the eclectic neighborhoods of the city, popping in and out of vintage thrift stores and hip little coffee shops.
I did what any good tourist would do when visiting the South and suggested we get some BBQ. We pulled into the parking lot of Edley’s BBQ around four in the afternoon—too late for the lunch rush but too early for the dinner rush. The restaurant was quiet. Two men sat at the bar, and a family of three filled one of the booths, but otherwise, we had the place to ourselves.
The four of us ordered our food at the register and then slipped comfortably into one of the booths by the entrance. After a few minutes, our food arrived at the table—pork sandwiches and brisket and mac and cheese and green beans. Good old Southern fare. We were having a great time, getting lost in stories of past lives and not thinking too much about what was going on around us.
About midway through our meal, two men walked into the restaurant and sat two booths away from us. They looked normal to me—nothing strange or off-putting about their appearance. Libby left our table for a moment—I forget why, maybe to get napkins or refill her drink—but when she got back to our booth, she leaned in close to me and said under her breath, “We should probably get going soon.”
“Why?” I asked.
“That guy just flipped me off,” she whispered, making sure her girlfriend and her girlfriend’s friend didn’t hear our conversation.
“Did you do anything to him?” I asked.
“No—I made eye contact with him as I was passing, so I nodded and smiled, and he flipped me off,” she explained. “Don’t say anything,” she added, not wanting to disrupt the meal.
Now, here’s the thing about Libby—she’s not the most masculine lesbian I know, but she certainly isn’t the most feminine either. She dresses in a way that might be described as tomboyish. That day, she was wearing a T-shirt, jeans, and cowboy boots, topped off with a trucker hat and a vintage leather jacket.
“Which guy?” I asked, craning my neck above the top of the booth to get a better look.
“The one with the hat, right over there.” She gestured toward the men sitting two booths away.
“Okay,” I nodded.
Here’s the other thing to know about Libby—she’s a native New Yorker. Getting the bird from a strange man is just another day in the life where she’s from. She has high situational awareness and understands how quickly chaos can unfold. She remained calm but vigilant, appearing unfazed so as not to cause a scene.
At that moment, she and I were the only ones aware that this had happened. Libby’s girlfriend and friend were caught up in their own conversation and hadn’t heard our exchange.
But as we finished our meal, a violent storm started brewing within me.
When someone you care about gets hurt or is attacked for no good reason at all, the first knee-jerk reaction is often anger—a hot rage that burns slowly like coals in a furnace. As we sat in our booth, I started playing out scenes in my mind, scenes of retaliation and vengeance, as if I were in an episode of The Sopranos and intimidation was how you solved all your problems. I imagined what I would say or do if, instead of having three small but mighty women with me, I had Christopher, Paulie, and Silvio by my side.
I daydreamed, momentarily, about putting this man in his place and setting things right again in the world.
But just as quickly as I had been captured by the rageful trance, I was shaken from it—everyone had finished eating, and it was time to go.
We left the restaurant, got in the car, and drove off, never to see the man again, never to worry about what he might’ve done.
Yet here I am, all these weeks later, still thinking about him.
As we were walking away, Libby said to me, “Yeah, we’re in Tennessee. You just never know who has a gun.”
And that’s true—52% of people in Tennessee own a gun, compared to 41% in Pennsylvania, where I’m from, and just 20% in New York, where Libby is from. When half the people in Tennessee own a gun, you have to assume guys like the one at the BBQ place are among them.
Later that day, Libby said, jokingly, “I just wonder how much repressed gayness you have to have to flip off a lesbian at a BBQ place.”
And she has a point. When people lash out hatefully at others, it’s usually because of something they hate in themselves. Maybe that man was a closeted gay. Or maybe he grew up with a father who called him a sissy. Or maybe a woman he once loved left him for another woman.
And maybe it wasn’t even that serious. Maybe it had nothing at all to do with the fact that Libby is a lesbian. Maybe he saw how much fun the four of us were having, and that made him jealous and angry because he very obviously was not.
You’ll drive yourself mad trying to understand the myriad ways a stranger is filled with such contempt and bitterness. It’s a futile effort.
But it still leaves us with the question: What do we do about all the hateful people in the world?
This question—what to do about hate—is a question as old as the tale of Cain and Abel.
Over the past decade, social movements have worked to address hate, bias, and injustice. But lately, we’ve seen a shift—corporations rolling back DEI initiatives and social movements losing traction. The era of “wokeness” seems to be coming to an end.
Paul Graham, in his recent essay The Origins of Wokeness, defines wokeness as:
An aggressively performative focus on social justice.
If we think about wokeness through this lens—especially the aggressively performative part—it starts to make sense why some movements focused more on looking like they were making a difference rather than actually making one.
At the height of wokeness, there were all sorts of aggressively performative incidents occurring—Latinos had to be referred to as Latinx, the “OK” hand symbol was deemed a symbol of white supremacy, brands rushed to rename products deemed offensive, corporations issued statements about social justice while doing little to enact real change, and celebrities posted black squares on Instagram to “raise awareness.” In some cases, activism veered into theatrics, with grand symbolic gestures that did little to create real change.
Over the years, I’ve heard well-meaning people echo common “woke” sentiments like, “I could never fully understand the experience of a black or brown person” or “I could never truly grasp what a gay or trans person goes through.” These statements are meant to show humility, an acknowledgment that lived experiences differ.
But sometimes, that kind of distancing—the idea that someone’s experience is so different that it’s beyond comprehension—can create more separation than solidarity. Because in order to help someone, you have to at least try to understand what they’re going through. That’s what empathy is: not standing back and saying, I could never understand, but stepping forward and asking, What would it feel like to be in this person’s shoes?
And when you witness hate firsthand, as I did at the BBQ restaurant with Libby, empathy stops being theoretical. It becomes visceral. It becomes easy to understand why marginalized groups might feel uneasy, why certain spaces might not feel safe, why something as simple as existing in public can sometimes feel like an act of defiance.
Because for a moment, I wasn’t watching from a distance. I was there. I was in the middle of it. And I had to ask myself: How would I have felt, really, if it had been me who was flipped off?
I recently started reading East of Eden by John Steinbeck. There’s a part near the beginning where he discusses monsters among men:
“To a monster, the norm must seem monstrous, since everyone is normal to himself… To a man born without conscience, a soul-stricken man must seem ridiculous. To a criminal, honesty is foolish. You must not forget that a monster is only a variation, and that to a monster the norm is monstrous.”
There really are monsters in this world.
There are people who, probably due to circumstances beyond their control, have no regard for morality or social norms. They are violent, psychopathic, unpredictable, and cruel. They’ll steal another man’s jacket right off his back, unwarranted and without remorse. (Warning: This hyperlink leads to somewhat upsetting content.)
Monsters like that are overtly bad. Eventually, the law will catch up with them (often too late, after irreparable damage has been done).
But there are also monsters who operate more subtly, in small devious ways—like the man at the BBQ restaurant. Monsters who use every small, petty opportunity to spread their resentment and hostility to the world. And these monsters are the ones you have to worry about the most because they hide in plain sight, mixed in among us.
So what do we do about all the hateful people in the world?
The truth is, there’s very little we can do.
We can try, with our best effort, to at least understand what they’re going through or how they might’ve gotten to be the way they are. We can try not to see them as monsters—to understand that they are just flawed humans doing wrongful things.
We can try to have a little empathy.
But we can’t change these people, and so we must look inward to what we can control: our own actions.
And oftentimes, our actions require us to be there, simply and steadfastly, for the ones we care about. It reminds me of The Lord of the Rings—the best story about friendship ever created (in my opinion). There’s a scene when Samwise and Frodo are lying on the slopes of Mount Doom, and just as all hope seems lost, when it seems impossible to dispose of the ring, Samwise says to Frodo, “I can’t carry it for you, but I can carry you.” Then he lifts Frodo onto his back and carries him to the top of the mountain.
There’s many things that we ourselves can’t carry, but we can always carry our friends, our family, our partners and spouses. We can lift people up when they need to be lifted, and we can stand by their side when they feel alone. We can do it in small ways, ways that maybe only they will notice—but that make all the difference in the world nonetheless.
And sometimes, the best action to take is none at all.
It takes a tremendous amount of bravery to walk away from a fight, to diffuse an intense or hostile situation, to do the right thing—the peaceful thing—and to leave a hateful person alone, stewing in their own bitterness.
In choosing to walk away, Libby displayed the strongest kind of courage: restraint.
In the end, we can’t control hateful people. But we can control ourselves—how we react, how we choose to move through the world, and whether we add to the fire or walk away with our dignity intact.
Let me tell you the story of the time a homophobe gave my friend the middle finger in a BBQ restaurant.
It happened a few weeks ago when I was visiting my friend Libby in Nashville. (For those wondering, I’ve asked Libby if I can share this story publicly, and she gave me permission.)
Libby lives with her girlfriend in a nice cozy home in East Nashville. Her girlfriend had a friend visiting at the time too, so there were four of us—a ragtag bunch of hooligans roaming wildly around the eclectic neighborhoods of the city, popping in and out of vintage thrift stores and hip little coffee shops.
I did what any good tourist would do when visiting the South and suggested we get some BBQ. We pulled into the parking lot of Edley’s BBQ around four in the afternoon—too late for the lunch rush but too early for the dinner rush. The restaurant was quiet. Two men sat at the bar, and a family of three filled one of the booths, but otherwise, we had the place to ourselves.
The four of us ordered our food at the register and then slipped comfortably into one of the booths by the entrance. After a few minutes, our food arrived at the table—pork sandwiches and brisket and mac and cheese and green beans. Good old Southern fare. We were having a great time, getting lost in stories of past lives and not thinking too much about what was going on around us.
About midway through our meal, two men walked into the restaurant and sat two booths away from us. They looked normal to me—nothing strange or off-putting about their appearance. Libby left our table for a moment—I forget why, maybe to get napkins or refill her drink—but when she got back to our booth, she leaned in close to me and said under her breath, “We should probably get going soon.”
“Why?” I asked.
“That guy just flipped me off,” she whispered, making sure her girlfriend and her girlfriend’s friend didn’t hear our conversation.
“Did you do anything to him?” I asked.
“No—I made eye contact with him as I was passing, so I nodded and smiled, and he flipped me off,” she explained. “Don’t say anything,” she added, not wanting to disrupt the meal.
Now, here’s the thing about Libby—she’s not the most masculine lesbian I know, but she certainly isn’t the most feminine either. She dresses in a way that might be described as tomboyish. That day, she was wearing a T-shirt, jeans, and cowboy boots, topped off with a trucker hat and a vintage leather jacket.
“Which guy?” I asked, craning my neck above the top of the booth to get a better look.
“The one with the hat, right over there.” She gestured toward the men sitting two booths away.
“Okay,” I nodded.
Here’s the other thing to know about Libby—she’s a native New Yorker. Getting the bird from a strange man is just another day in the life where she’s from. She has high situational awareness and understands how quickly chaos can unfold. She remained calm but vigilant, appearing unfazed so as not to cause a scene.
At that moment, she and I were the only ones aware that this had happened. Libby’s girlfriend and friend were caught up in their own conversation and hadn’t heard our exchange.
But as we finished our meal, a violent storm started brewing within me.
When someone you care about gets hurt or is attacked for no good reason at all, the first knee-jerk reaction is often anger—a hot rage that burns slowly like coals in a furnace. As we sat in our booth, I started playing out scenes in my mind, scenes of retaliation and vengeance, as if I were in an episode of The Sopranos and intimidation was how you solved all your problems. I imagined what I would say or do if, instead of having three small but mighty women with me, I had Christopher, Paulie, and Silvio by my side.
I daydreamed, momentarily, about putting this man in his place and setting things right again in the world.
But just as quickly as I had been captured by the rageful trance, I was shaken from it—everyone had finished eating, and it was time to go.
We left the restaurant, got in the car, and drove off, never to see the man again, never to worry about what he might’ve done.
Yet here I am, all these weeks later, still thinking about him.
As we were walking away, Libby said to me, “Yeah, we’re in Tennessee. You just never know who has a gun.”
And that’s true—52% of people in Tennessee own a gun, compared to 41% in Pennsylvania, where I’m from, and just 20% in New York, where Libby is from. When half the people in Tennessee own a gun, you have to assume guys like the one at the BBQ place are among them.
Later that day, Libby said, jokingly, “I just wonder how much repressed gayness you have to have to flip off a lesbian at a BBQ place.”
And she has a point. When people lash out hatefully at others, it’s usually because of something they hate in themselves. Maybe that man was a closeted gay. Or maybe he grew up with a father who called him a sissy. Or maybe a woman he once loved left him for another woman.
And maybe it wasn’t even that serious. Maybe it had nothing at all to do with the fact that Libby is a lesbian. Maybe he saw how much fun the four of us were having, and that made him jealous and angry because he very obviously was not.
You’ll drive yourself mad trying to understand the myriad ways a stranger is filled with such contempt and bitterness. It’s a futile effort.
But it still leaves us with the question: What do we do about all the hateful people in the world?
This question—what to do about hate—is a question as old as the tale of Cain and Abel.
Over the past decade, social movements have worked to address hate, bias, and injustice. But lately, we’ve seen a shift—corporations rolling back DEI initiatives and social movements losing traction. The era of “wokeness” seems to be coming to an end.
Paul Graham, in his recent essay The Origins of Wokeness, defines wokeness as:
An aggressively performative focus on social justice.
If we think about wokeness through this lens—especially the aggressively performative part—it starts to make sense why some movements focused more on looking like they were making a difference rather than actually making one.
At the height of wokeness, there were all sorts of aggressively performative incidents occurring—Latinos had to be referred to as Latinx, the “OK” hand symbol was deemed a symbol of white supremacy, brands rushed to rename products deemed offensive, corporations issued statements about social justice while doing little to enact real change, and celebrities posted black squares on Instagram to “raise awareness.” In some cases, activism veered into theatrics, with grand symbolic gestures that did little to create real change.
Over the years, I’ve heard well-meaning people echo common “woke” sentiments like, “I could never fully understand the experience of a black or brown person” or “I could never truly grasp what a gay or trans person goes through.” These statements are meant to show humility, an acknowledgment that lived experiences differ.
But sometimes, that kind of distancing—the idea that someone’s experience is so different that it’s beyond comprehension—can create more separation than solidarity. Because in order to help someone, you have to at least try to understand what they’re going through. That’s what empathy is: not standing back and saying, I could never understand, but stepping forward and asking, What would it feel like to be in this person’s shoes?
And when you witness hate firsthand, as I did at the BBQ restaurant with Libby, empathy stops being theoretical. It becomes visceral. It becomes easy to understand why marginalized groups might feel uneasy, why certain spaces might not feel safe, why something as simple as existing in public can sometimes feel like an act of defiance.
Because for a moment, I wasn’t watching from a distance. I was there. I was in the middle of it. And I had to ask myself: How would I have felt, really, if it had been me who was flipped off?
I recently started reading East of Eden by John Steinbeck. There’s a part near the beginning where he discusses monsters among men:
“To a monster, the norm must seem monstrous, since everyone is normal to himself… To a man born without conscience, a soul-stricken man must seem ridiculous. To a criminal, honesty is foolish. You must not forget that a monster is only a variation, and that to a monster the norm is monstrous.”
There really are monsters in this world.
There are people who, probably due to circumstances beyond their control, have no regard for morality or social norms. They are violent, psychopathic, unpredictable, and cruel. They’ll steal another man’s jacket right off his back, unwarranted and without remorse. (Warning: This hyperlink leads to somewhat upsetting content.)
Monsters like that are overtly bad. Eventually, the law will catch up with them (often too late, after irreparable damage has been done).
But there are also monsters who operate more subtly, in small devious ways—like the man at the BBQ restaurant. Monsters who use every small, petty opportunity to spread their resentment and hostility to the world. And these monsters are the ones you have to worry about the most because they hide in plain sight, mixed in among us.
So what do we do about all the hateful people in the world?
The truth is, there’s very little we can do.
We can try, with our best effort, to at least understand what they’re going through or how they might’ve gotten to be the way they are. We can try not to see them as monsters—to understand that they are just flawed humans doing wrongful things.
We can try to have a little empathy.
But we can’t change these people, and so we must look inward to what we can control: our own actions.
And oftentimes, our actions require us to be there, simply and steadfastly, for the ones we care about. It reminds me of The Lord of the Rings—the best story about friendship ever created (in my opinion). There’s a scene when Samwise and Frodo are lying on the slopes of Mount Doom, and just as all hope seems lost, when it seems impossible to dispose of the ring, Samwise says to Frodo, “I can’t carry it for you, but I can carry you.” Then he lifts Frodo onto his back and carries him to the top of the mountain.
There’s many things that we ourselves can’t carry, but we can always carry our friends, our family, our partners and spouses. We can lift people up when they need to be lifted, and we can stand by their side when they feel alone. We can do it in small ways, ways that maybe only they will notice—but that make all the difference in the world nonetheless.
And sometimes, the best action to take is none at all.
It takes a tremendous amount of bravery to walk away from a fight, to diffuse an intense or hostile situation, to do the right thing—the peaceful thing—and to leave a hateful person alone, stewing in their own bitterness.
In choosing to walk away, Libby displayed the strongest kind of courage: restraint.
In the end, we can’t control hateful people. But we can control ourselves—how we react, how we choose to move through the world, and whether we add to the fire or walk away with our dignity intact.
